The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Category: Administrivia

Overhead

  • Presentation Video: Bring Enough Adapters

    I plugged my trusty Dell Latitude E6410 into the VGA cable connected to a Viewsonic projector at TechShop Detroit to give the OpenSCAD Modeling presentation, but the display showed a surprising amount of ghosting; whether that was due to a bad cable or the usual presentation gremlins, I cannot say. Fortunately, although I didn’t have a VGA cable, I did have a fair assortment of adapters for the laptop’s DisplayPort output…

    On the laptop end, DisplayPort to a DVI-D cable:

    Latitude vs Viewsonic - DisplayPort to DVI-D
    Latitude vs Viewsonic – DisplayPort to DVI-D

    On the Viewsonic end, DVI-D to HDMI:

    Latitude vs Viewsonic - DVI-D to HDMI
    Latitude vs Viewsonic – DVI-D to HDMI

    Worked like a champ!

    The projector in the room for the Arduino Survival Guide presentation had a VGA cable, but had been losing sync and turning itself off, so I unplugged that, rebuilt the DisplayPort adapter string, and continued the mission.

    I must add a known-good VGA cable and corresponding adapters to the assortment…

  • CNC Workshop 2015: Arduino Survival Guide, Workshop Edition

    MOSFET RDS Tester - Arduino
    MOSFET RDS Tester – Arduino

    Armed with bags of electronic parts and boxes of meters, I’ll be helping folks at the CNC Workshop understand the electrical limitations of the Arduino microcontrollers they’re building into projects.

    The presentation in PDF form:

    Arduino Survival Guide – Workshop Edition – CNC Workshop 2015

    We’ll wing it with the source code, because nothing’s more than a few lines long…

  • CNC Workshop 2015: Practical Solid Modeling with OpenSCAD

    HP Plotter Pen Polygon
    HP Plotter Pen Polygon

    This afternoon at the CNC Workshop, I’ll be bootstrapping folks into creating 3D-printable solid models with Openscad.

    The presentation in PDF form:

    Practical Solid Modeling for 3D Printing with OpenSCAD – CNC Workshop 2015

    The OpenSCAD source code for the exercises, in case you don’t want to type along:

    Practical Solid Modeling for 3D Printing with OpenSCAD – Models.zip.odt

    When you download that file, you’ll get something ending in .zip.odt. Rename it to remove the .odt extension, because it’s really a ZIP file; WordPress doesn’t allow users to uploads ZIP files.

  • CNC Workshop 2015: Personal 3D Printing Status Report

    Toroid Mount - Build layout
    Toroid Mount – Build layout

    If all has gone according to plan, I’m in Detroit today and will give a talk at the CNC Workshop on (my view of) the status of personal 3D printing, what to expect in the future, and what you can do with it today.

    The presentation in PDF form: 3D Printing Status 2105-06 – CNC Workshop Detroit

  • Where Web Content Comes From

    Make sure you’re running an ad blocker and perhaps a script killer, feed “Larval Engineer received a Pilot InstaBoost” into your favorite search engine, along these lines:

    Google

    DuckDuckGo

    Bing

    The first (few) hits should be the various ways my original post from late last year appears on wordpress.com, but the rest (particularly from Google) will be spam blogs and scraper sites that ripped my text, ran it past a thesaurus (euphemistically known as article spinning), larded the result with keywords, and reposted the shattered remains. If you click on the links, you’ll have the experience of reading text where short sequences of words make sense, but the overall corpus leaves you shaking your head in disbelief.

    Even though Google allegedly doesn’t reward such sites, they make up the bulk of its list. DuckDuckGo does a slightly better job of suppressing them and Bing kills nearly all of the junk, which suggests that Google operates with a powerful incentive to not notice problems in sites serving (its?) advertisements.

    There’s obviously no point in getting annoyed with any of the participants…

    FWIW, that particular post seems to have drawn the attention of scammers due to the presence of a trademarked brand name with good search-ability. Other posts have been more fortunate in escaping their attention, despite my glowing prose…

  • Scratching Their Itch

    Although the Big Search Sites no longer provide the keywords that select my posts (because they sell that data to their advertisers), a few snippets leak in from smaller operations.

    People evidently have this problem a lot:

    • if you take brewers yeast will bed bugs bite you
    • bed bug teflon tape
    • hot box bed bug
    • co2 bed bug trap
    • bed bugs in chairs
    • does denatured alcohol kill bed bugs
    • does frog tape wcatch bedbugs
    • carpet tape bed bugs
    • how to use yeast on bedbugs
    • can you trap bed bugs with hand warmer and dry ice

    But it’s not all bed bugs:

    • information on chili powder beetles
    • what bugs like chilli powder
    • get rid of chili powder beetles
    • why does arizona smell like chili powder at night

    Make you itchy just thinking about it, eh?

  • Blog Summary: 2014

    You can tell what’s important, out there in Search Engine City:

    Blog Summary - YE 2014
    Blog Summary – YE 2014

    The Arduino PWM frequency remains entirely too low, American Standard faucets must be reaching the end of their service life, and fruit flies crawled above bed bugs to reach the top spot of entomological concern.

    For the third year in a row, the fifth most popular post described removing a water heater anode rod.

    I feel badly about the Airship Pirates post: it must be a great disappointment for most folks who expect lurid Steampunk Comix action.

    You gotta admit: it’s eclectic!